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04 October, 2008

The shadow of impending Michaelmas term looms over everything, like the big flying saucers lurking over the White House in Independence Day. In true Gothic fashion, a storm batters the windows. These are dark days.

In celebration* following a recent interview for a teaching position, I return to a novel treat kindly provided by AL: a yancha bing.

*It seems that when a man reaches a certain age, he feels no jubilation at good news, merely relief.

AL, creator of the delightful Seven Tea Moons (one shown above) has kindly provided a good-sized sample of a perfectly circular bing. As pictured below, the sample comes from the edge of the cake, which appears to have uniform thickness and a crisp circular circumference - this bing could teach Xiaguan a thing or two about compression!

The leaves have a macabre Gieger-esque slickness about them, fitting the Gothic mood rather well. The sample looks like part of a hideous relic recovered from an alien world or a Lovecraftian fantasy.

Happily, the brew doesn't taste extra-terrestrial. In fact, it's a rather rich raisin-like affair. Very clean and smooth, it is a welcome tonic to the End of Days which appears to be taking place outside the window.

I don't encounter a great deal of yancha, though not by design. This was a welcome foray into a part of the teasphere that I don't habitually visit - thanks again, AL.

If the eldritch horrors from unimagineable aeons past drink teas like this, I could learn to Cthulhu fhtagn with the best of them.

This is indeed a bing formed entirely from yancha leaves. It's yancha compressed into a cake, basically. I imagine this is just for novelty value, rather than anything to do with maturing. I know very little about the actual tea itself, but it's just an everyday quality. I don't think they use their finest yancha for making novelty bing. :)

we are already up and running this term... I bet that the wuyi tea used would not be of the highest quality! Nevertheless it would be interesting to see (and taste) whether there may be any improvements or changes because of the pressing...

I imagine that being hyper-compressed might make it difficult to re-roast this tea, which some folk like to do with their wulong periodically, of course. I suspect that it's really just pressed in order to get that bas-relief image of the tea-horse, or the pagoda, or whichever look the producer wishes to display on their tea. :)

I usually give such teas a wide berth. Certainly, they're the ones that seem to fill the majority of the windows in the touristy tea-shops.

Toodlepip,

Hobbes

P.s. We're moving soon (two weeks), having taken the plunge into the somewhat extortionate Oxford housing market. Maybe when we meet up for a tea-session, it'll be in our new place. :)

If folks are interested about these, there are a couple threads about it on rec.food.drink.tea, including one recently.

The Teaspring one looks like a Wuyi Star (http://www.wuyistar-tea.com) brand from the logo pressed into the cake; that one should be available from multiple sources, since Wuyi Star is a pretty big factory.

In that area, they also sometimes stuff pomelo with yan cha and age it.

My guess is that re-roasting isn't as necessary as with loose oolong, since there's less surface area exposed to air, especially with very tight compression.

I was just in Wuyishan, and some of those Yanchabing look really expensive. The price quoted in most shops was 80 Yuan for something that looked like it was about 150 grams. That is about 12USD, and it was too expensive for me. I asked when Wuyi started making tea cakes and one proprietor said they had 'always' been making them, just in the past they had been for farmers' personal use. It would be interesting to age one and see what happened. Many of the cakes in Wuyi are covered in plastic wrap. should they be sealed like Yancha, or should they be allowed to age like Pu'er?